Tickets#

A ticket is one card on a board. This page covers everything you can do to one from the app. If you want to do the same things from a script, see Tickets by API.

Before you start#

You need a writer role — owner, admin or member — and access to the board. Viewers can open tickets and read comments but cannot change anything.

Create a ticket#

There are three ways in, and all three ask for a title and nothing else:

• New task in the board header, or press C anywhere on the board that is not a text field. This opens a quick-create form in the first column.
• The + in a column header.
• Add task at the bottom of a column.

Type the title into What needs doing? and press Enter or click Add task. The ticket appears at the bottom of that column. Escape cancels, and clicking away from an empty form closes it.

Titles can be up to 500 characters. Everything else is filled in afterwards by opening the ticket.

A fourth way in is not on the board at all: the browser extension files a ticket from the page you are looking at, with a screenshot, a recording of the tab and the URL already on it.

The fields a ticket has#

Click a card to open the ticket dialog. It has:

One thing people expect to find and will not:

• There is no cover image field. When Cover image is switched on in Card display, the card shows the oldest image attachment on that ticket. To change the cover, delete that image attachment; to remove it, turn the preference off. See Filters and card display.

Groups#

The Group picker sits at the bottom of the rail beside the ticket, below Planning. It lists the groups this board has, plus No group — which is where a ticket starts and where it goes back to if you clear it.

If the group you want does not exist yet, click New group under the picker, type a name and press Enter. The group is created on the board — it appears in the filter row's tabs straight away — and this ticket is put into it, without leaving the ticket you are reading. Guests cannot create groups.

Changing the group saves like every other field here: there is no Save button. See Filters and card display for filtering a board by group.

Fields this board defines#

Beyond the list above, a board can carry fields of its own. They are per board on purpose: "Size" means story points on one board and T-shirts on another, and a workspace-wide definition would make one of them wrong.

An owner or admin creates them from the board header, under Card display → Manage fields: a name, and one of six types.

Defining a field is an owner or admin decision; filling one in is not — anyone who can edit a ticket can. Which fields show on the cards is a preference of your own, ticked on in the same panel, so two people can look at the same board with different fields on the cards. Custom fields are included in a board's CSV export and can be set through the API.

Click Save changes (or press Cmd/Ctrl+Enter) to save and close. Close discards nothing you have already saved but abandons unsaved edits.

Split a line of the description into its own ticket#

A description that has grown a checklist inside it can be broken up without retyping anything. Highlight the words — with the mouse, or with Shift+arrows — and a small menu appears over the selection with Create ticket; the ticket-plus button in the editor toolbar does the same thing for whatever is highlighted.

What you get:

• The first line becomes the title, with any bullet, number or checkbox marker dropped, so highlighting - Ship the docs makes a ticket called "Ship the docs". A title longer than 120 characters is cut at a word.
• The whole selection becomes the description, unless that would only repeat the title.
• The new ticket lands in the first column of the same board, in the same group as the ticket you were reading.
• The highlighted words turn into a link to it, so the paragraph you split keeps a trace of where the work went. A confirmation appears beside them with a way to open it.

If the text moves under you while the ticket is being created — a colleague editing the same description, or your own typing — the ticket is still made and the prose is left alone.

How ticket order works#

Each ticket carries a position number, and a column is drawn in position order. The order is stored on the ticket, so it is the same order for everyone looking at the board — it is not a personal view.

What that means day to day:

• A brand new ticket, a duplicate, and a ticket moved in by a hover shortcut or a bulk action all land at the bottom of their column.
• Dragging a card puts it exactly where you dropped it, by giving it a position between its new neighbours.
• A ticket moved to another board lands at the bottom of the matching column there.

Move a ticket between columns#

Any of these work:

• Drag the card into another column and drop it at the point you want.
• Open the ticket and pick a different Status.
• Hover the card and click one of the hover shortcuts — small buttons that move the ticket straight to a column you have chosen in Card display. With none configured you still get one shortcut to the board's completion column, labelled "Mark as completed".
• Select several cards and use Set status in the group action bar.

Reorder tickets inside a column#

Drag the card up or down; a line shows the slot it will drop into.

Reordering by drag is the only way to change a ticket's place in a column — there is no keyboard equivalent for cards, and no "move to top" action.

Reordering within a column is switched off while anything is hiding tickets — the Filter tasks box, Assigned to me, or any filter in the Filters panel — because the column on screen is not the whole column, so a drop would put the ticket somewhere you did not intend. Moving a ticket to a different column still works, and the header says so while a filter is active. Clear the filters to reorder within a column again.

Assign people#

• From the board: right-click a card (or click its ⋮ menu) to open Ticket actions, then tick or untick names under Assignees.
• From the ticket: click the people icon in the dialog header and tick names under Assignees.

Only active members of the workspace can be assigned. Assignment changes are recorded in the ticket's activity timeline.

Link tickets to each other#

Relationships, in the open ticket, records how one ticket stands to another. Pick the kind of link, choose the other ticket, and click Link.

Blocked by and Blocks are the two ends of one link: adding "A is blocked by B" is the same fact as "B blocks A", and it shows on both tickets. Each linked ticket is listed with the column it is sitting in, and the section header counts what is still outstanding — "waiting on 2 blockers" — where a blocker counts as cleared once it reaches a completing column.

The × beside a link removes it. Linking does not move, lock or change either ticket; it is a fact about them, not a rule. It becomes a rule only if you ask for one: a column with a no unfinished blockers entry requirement will refuse a ticket whose blockers are not done — see Boards.

Break a ticket into sub-tickets#

Work too big for one card can be split into smaller tickets that stay attached to it. Sub-tickets, in the open ticket, is where that happens: type a title, press Enter or click Add, and a new ticket appears under this one.

A sub-ticket is an ordinary ticket: it sits in a column, and it can be assigned, commented on, labelled, dated and closed like any other — being part of something bigger changes none of that. Use Success Criteria instead when the pieces are steps rather than work anyone would pick up on its own: a checklist line has no column, no assignee and no ticket of its own.

What it does not get is a second card on the board. A sub-ticket is folded into the card of the ticket it is part of, which carries a done/total count of the pieces it is holding, so breaking one ticket into five leaves one card on the board instead of six. Open the parent to see the pieces, and click a title there to open one.

A sub-ticket can be broken down in turn. Its pieces fold into the same card the whole chain ends at — the nearest ticket that still has one — and that card's count includes them, so nothing is held by a card that is not on the board.

Two things bring a sub-ticket back onto the board as its own card:

• Filtering. While any filter is on, the board is being searched rather than read, so sub-tickets that match what you typed get their own cards — a filter that hid the ticket it just matched would be no filter at all.
• A parent somewhere else. A piece is only folded away when there is a card on the board in front of you to fold it into. Move a sub-ticket to another board, file it under a ticket on a board you have not been given, or view a group its parent is not in, and it keeps its card where it is rather than vanishing from every board at once.

What the section shows:

• Every sub-ticket, with the column it is sitting in, and a done/total count beside the heading. A sub-ticket counts as done once it reaches a completing column — the same rule blockers use.
• The column on a row is a picker, not a label: choose another one and the piece moves there, without opening it. The count and the line through a finished piece follow immediately, and the card on the board catches up on its next refresh. A piece you have moved to another board keeps a plain label instead — its columns belong to that board, and this one cannot offer them. A column with entry requirements can still refuse the piece, and says why.
• × on a row detaches that sub-ticket. The ticket itself is untouched — it stops being part of this one and goes back to having its own card, in the column it was already in.

Open a sub-ticket and Part of, with the parent's title and the column it is in, sits along the top of the ticket you are reading — beside its ID, just left of Drag to move. Click it to go back up: the ticket you were in saves and closes first, and Back still returns you to the board. Clicking a sub-ticket's title in the section below does the same thing in the other direction. On a phone the parent's column is left off that row so its title has the width.

A ticket can only sit under a parent in the same workspace, and only under one you can open — filing work under a ticket on a board you were never given is refused, in the same words as a ticket that does not exist. A ticket cannot be put under itself, or under one of its own pieces; Laver refuses the move rather than making a loop.

Deleting a parent never deletes the work underneath it. Its sub-tickets stay where they are, get their cards back and simply stop being part of anything.

Repeat a ticket#

Some work comes back every week whether or not anyone writes it down again. Repeats, in the open ticket, is where you say so.

1. Click Repeat this ticket….
2. Choose how often: Every n days / weeks / months / years, with n between 1 and 52.
3. Pick the date it should first run on.
4. Start repeating.

The card then says when the next one is due, with Edit, Skip next — which pushes the schedule on by one without producing a ticket — and Stop.

What a repeat produces is a new ticket, not a reopened one. It copies the title, description, priority, labels and custom fields of the ticket the rule is on, and lands in the column that ticket was in when you set the schedule up. Assignees, dates, comments, attachments and subtasks are not carried over: the previous occurrence is a record of what happened, and it is left alone.

Stopping a repeat leaves every ticket it has already created exactly where it is.

One occurrence is created per due date as it comes round, and a ticket a repeat created cannot itself repeat — it says so, and points at the original.

Wait for a column to free up#

Move when a column frees up, in the open ticket, parks a ticket until a named column is empty and then moves it there — "start this the moment Doing is free". Choose the column and click Wait for it; the ticket says what it is waiting for until then, and Cancel calls it off.

Beside the column is how many times it should do this, because a ticket can come back out of a column and the column can empty a second time. Once is the default and is what most people mean — the ticket goes in, and if it is later sent back it stays where it was put. Choose twice, three, five or ten times for a ticket you want pulled in again, or Every time for a standing arrangement with no end to it. The ticket says which you picked, and a rule that has used up its moves says so and stops.

It is one ticket's queue rather than a board rule, which is why it lives on the ticket. Setting one is an owner or admin job, and the control is only shown to them. Underneath it is an ordinary automation, so it appears with the board's other rules, where it can be switched off or deleted — see Automations.

Move a ticket to another board#

• From the board: right-click the card and pick a board under Move to board, or use Move to board in the group action bar for several at once.
• From the ticket: click Move to board in the dialog footer and pick the destination. Anything you have just typed is saved first, and the dialog closes once the ticket has moved.

Laver puts the ticket in the destination column whose name matches the one it came from, ignoring case. If there is no match it uses the destination's first column. Groups are matched the same way. The ticket lands at the bottom.

Boards belonging to a closed sprint are not offered, and a move into one is refused with "Tasks can only move to the current sprint board."

Duplicate a ticket#

Right-click the card and choose Duplicate ticket.

The copy takes the description, labels, priority, due date, assignees and success criteria, is titled "original title (copy)", and is added at the bottom of the same column. Comments and attachments are not copied.

Delete a ticket#

Either right-click the card and choose Delete ticket, or open the ticket and use Delete ticket at the bottom of the dialog.

The ticket disappears from the board for everyone, and there is no undo in the app — but it is not destroyed straight away. Deleted tickets, comments, wiki pages and ticket attachments go to a workspace trash and are recoverable for 30 days, after which a sweep removes them for good.

Trash in the sidebar is where you get it back. It lists what has been deleted in the workspace — you only see what you could have seen before it went — and each row has Restore and Delete permanently. Treat a deletion as reversible rather than as a mistake you cannot undo. See Trash and restore for the whole of it, including who is allowed to restore and what the 30-day sweep destroys.

To delete several at once: right-click a card, choose Select tickets, click the other cards you want, then Delete in the group action bar.

Work on several tickets at once#

Right-click any card and choose Select tickets. Clicking cards now adds and removes them from the selection, and a bar appears at the bottom with:

• Set status, Set priority, Add label, a due date picker
• Move to board
• Prefix / Suffix — adds the text you type to the front or back of every selected title
• Delete

Done clears the selection, as does Escape.

When two people edit the same ticket#

The description is edited live, like a wiki page: you see the other person's name and a coloured caret, and both sets of keystrokes are merged as they are typed. Nothing is refused and nothing has to be reconciled.

The rest of the ticket is not. Every save of the other fields carries the version of the ticket you were looking at, and if someone else saved first yours is refused with "Task was updated by another request." The board is live — it refreshes from the server as others make changes — so reopen the ticket, check what changed, and save again.

Keyboard shortcuts#

Cmd on Apple hardware, Ctrl everywhere else — Laver shows whichever your device spells.

On a board:

In an open ticket:

So cards are keyboard-movable: select one, then Cmd/Ctrl+Shift+an arrow.

Two of these can be switched off, per browser, under Keyboard shortcuts on your profile page — which is also where the full list lives, including the shortcuts that work anywhere in Laver:

• Single-key shortcuts — C and /. Turn this off if you keep firing them by accident.
• Ticket field shortcuts — Cmd/Ctrl+Shift+S and Cmd/Ctrl+Shift+D. Turn this off to give those chords back to your browser.